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Privacy

China has been building what it calls "the world's biggest camera
surveillance network". Across the country, 170 million CCTV cameras are
already in place and an estimated 400 million new ones will be installed in
the next three years.

Many of the cameras are fitted with artificial intelligence, including
facial recognition technology. The BBC's John Sudworth has been given rare
access to one of the new hi-tech police control rooms.

All popular browsers give users control over who gets to set cookies, but
Safari is the only one that blocks third-party cookies (those set by a
domain other than the site you are visiting) by default. (Safari's choice is
important because only 5-10%
of users ever change default settings in software.) Criteo relies on
third-party cookies. Since users have little reason to visit Criteo's own
website, the company gets its cookies onto users’ machines through its
integration on many online retail websites. Safari’s cookie blocking is a
major problem for Criteo, especially given the large and lucrative nature of
iPhone's user base. Rather than accept this, Criteo has repeatedly
implemented ways to defeat Safari's privacy protections.

In August 2016, Australia’s federal Department of Health published medical
billing records of about 2.9 million Australians online. These records came
from the Medicare Benefits Scheme (MBS) and the Pharmaceutical Benefits
Scheme (PBS) containing 1 billion lines of historical health data from the
records of around 10 per cent of the population.

These longitudinal records were de-identified, a process intended to
prevent a person’s identity from being connected with information, and were
made public on the government’s open data
website as part of its policy on accessible public data.

Tech

The algorithms that play increasingly central roles in our lives often
emanate from Silicon Valley, but the effort to hold them accountable may
have another epicenter: New York City. Last week, the New York City Council
unanimously passed a bill to tackle algorithmic discrimination — the first
measure of its kind in the country.

The algorithmic
accountability bill, waiting to be signed into law by Mayor Bill de
Blasio, establishes a task force that will study how city agencies use
algorithms to make decisions that affect New Yorkers’ lives, and whether any
of the systems appear to discriminate against people based on age, race,
religion, gender, sexual orientation or citizenship status. The task force’s
report will also explore how to make these decision-making processes
understandable to the public.

“Sometimes it comes up with a desert and it thinks its an indecent image
or pornography,” Mark Stokes, the department’s head of digital and
electronics forensics, recently told
The Telegraph. “For some reason, lots of people have
screen-savers of deserts and it picks it up thinking it is skin colour.”